Soft Computing and the Life Sciences - Philosophical Remarks

The core of soft computing consists of "fuzzy sets and systems" (FSS) "computing with words" (CW) and the "computational theory of perceptions" (CTP). These methodologies found first applications in the life sciences. One part of this paper presents some aspects of the history of philosophy of life sciences. The second part focuses on a generalization in a sense of meta-scientific reflections: FSS, CW, and CTP build a stack of methodologies to help bridge the gap between systems and phenomena in the real world and scientific theories. Bridging this gap has been a problem in all philosophical approaches, both past and present. Here we use soft computing methodologies to extend the so-called structuralist view of empirical theories in order to represent the relation of empiricism and theoretical structures.